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Marketing Conservatism and Corporatism

“Conservatives and their ideas are good, liberals and their ideas are bad.”
You hear the message repeated a thousand different ways, over and over, every day. It is a strategy, an organized marketing campaign to create demand for conservatives, their policies and their candidates. Over time and unanswered, it sinks into the brain.
The fact is, marketing creates demand. So after decades of this, people start to demand conservative policies and candidates and their politicians just ride that wave. In some areas conservative candidates can just point and shout, “liberal, liberal” and win elections. We see the results all around us – trillions of OUR dollars flow to the top. Our resources are “privatized” into the hands of corporations. We work longer hours for lower pay, losing our health insurance and pensions and rights… Our environment is polluted and our resources extracted.
Repeat: this is a strategic marketing campaign to get people to accept being ruled by wealthy corporatists. Marketing creates demand. Repetition drives a point home.
Today’s example just came in the morning e-mail. Read this and you’ll see that it follows the same tired script: liberals and their ideas are bad, and conservatives and their ideas are good. Marketing creates demand, and this is marketing, promoting conservative values and ideas and candidates.

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
“Why do they hate us?” Some conservatives, following President Bush, believe that Muslim anti-Americanism stems from irrational hatred of our freedom and democracy. Others lay the blame on our foreign policy. Now comes bestselling conservative author Dinesh D’Souza to argue that both views, while they contain elements of truth, miss the larger reason. In The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.

“In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” D’Souza explains. “I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the non-profit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage – some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left.”
In The Enemy at Home, D’Souza uncovers the links between the spread of America’s decadent pop culture, leftist ideas, and secular values and the rise of virulent Anti-Americanism throughout the world. He shows how liberals are responsible for fostering — and exporting — a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. He also reveals how liberals’ outspoken opposition to American foreign policy — especially our conduct of the war on terror — contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world.
Though we are accustomed to thinking of the war on terror and the culture war as distinct and separate, D’Souza argues, they are really one and the same. Conservatives must recognize that the left is now allied with the Islamic radicals in a combined effort to defeat Bush’s war on terror. A whole new strategy is therefore needed to fight both wars. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries. In short, writes D’Souza, “to defeat the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.”

This is horrible, lying, smearing propaganda, designed to incite hatred against half of America. And it works. We see this stuff in one form or another every single day. Conservatives bathe in it, but the regular public also is showered with it. The worst thing is, it is largely unanswered. People in some parts of the country never hear an opposing viewpoint.
In Are Progressives Good? Then TELL PEOPLE! I wrote,

So it is time to change the game. It is time to start funding organizations that talk to the public about the benefits that progressive values and ideas and policies and candidates bring to them. $1000 given today toward building public appreciation of progressive values could have greater impact than $100,000 spent in support of a candidate in the days before an election.

And I closed that piece by writing,

Marketing creates demand. Let’s create a demand for progressive values and ideas and policies and candidates.The Commonweal Institute wants to tell people that progressive values and ideas and policies and candidates are good for them. (Commonweal means “the public good” or “the common good.”)
As I wrote the other day, I am an unpaid Commonweal Institute Fellow. Let’s change that. Click here to help.